As Goes Ohio...Election Protection Conference
Bob Fitrakis and Steve Rosenfeld on pre-Election Day Board of Elections Monitoring Project

Link: Fitrakis & Board of Election Monitoring

Keynote Address - Mark Crispin Miller delivers the keynote speech at the As Goes Ohio...Election Protection Conference, held Sept. 24 and 25 in Columbus.

Miller is a professor of media studies at New York University and author of the books: "Loser Take All," "Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections" and "The Bush Dyslexicon." He is known for his writing on American media and for his activism on behalf of democratic media reform.

YouTube Link: Mark Crispin Miller Keynote (second one from left)

Mark Crispin Miller Interview:

The 'Trinity' of Reform

The chances of independent candidate Ralph Nader winning the presidency are as remote as ever in this, his fourth try. But he has important things to say about vital matters that mainstream contenders virtually ignore.

Democrat Barack Obama professes to be – and undoubtedly is – a strong supporter of organized labor. Like most other Democratic office seekers, he’s endorsed the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, which is designed to reverse the steady decline in labor’s fortunes,

But neither Obama nor any of labor’s other Democratic allies has called for the step beyond enactment of the Free Choice Act that is essential if labor is to grow and prosper. Ralph Nader demands it: “Repeal Taft-Hartley!”

That’s the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 -- aka in labor circles as “the slave-labor bill” – which was passed by Congress over the veto of President Harry Truman in response to the great labor militancy that followed World War II. Nader says its passage was “one of the great blows to American democracy.” He calls it an employer-written law that has “fundamentally infringed on workers’ human rights” -- most importantly, their right to unionize.

1. WMD Lies

One should rightly assume that the weight of the US financial crisis, the full impact of which is just beginning to unravel, and the widening military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, would compel new thinking amongst leading US politicians. And then again, maybe not.

Aside from tactical and rhetorical differences, presidential candidates and their vice-president-hopefuls are yet to strictly champion and act upon a truly different leadership strategy: Barack Obama’s current foreign policy visions are more or less those of President Bush in his second term. Republican candidate John McCain, however, advocates a less solid and increasingly confusing set of principles: he strives to distance himself from a discredited, unpopular president, position himself as a man of experience and resolve, yet pander to the religious right and defend a hawkish strategy that is no less destructive than that championed by the neoconservative-designed Bush Doctrine, which led to two major wars and a near-complete loss of US credibility and leadership abroad.

Struggle: a Documentary set primarily in Ohio examines several conditions that lead to George W. Bush's victory in the 2004 Presidential election. This film places the audience right in the action with a unique "street level" perspective on the struggle to Protest Publicly or Vote Democratic in this American Society. Come see it at the Free Press Second Saturday Salon, Oct. 11.

The Producers of Struggle Struggle the Movie will be releasing segments of the film over the next month up until the eve of the 2008 Election. This film is a critical observation of an Electoral System in chaos which has produced subsequent fraudulent elections of President George W. Bush, and threatens to deliver another fraudulent result in the 2008 Presidential Election.

Struggle is the most recent "Street Level" Documentary from Mental-Rev Productions, directed by Roger Hill and in association with The Free Press www.freepress.org.